Wednesday, December 31, 2014

From ‘The Reluctant Tuscan. How I discovered my inner Italian’ by Phil Doran

…..Nancy….an interior designer ….. When she sees a house she
wants to redo, she gets a look on her face like a fifteen-year-old boy on a
topless beach…. she never met a room she didn’t think she could improve.

Our plane landed and taxied to a stop. We then had the
pleasure of sitting on the hot tarmac for 45 minutes while the Alitalia ground
crew figured out how to open our door.

‘Buon giorno, signora,
Piacere,’ I said, using up ten per cent of my Italian vocabulary

…..a small two-storey affair that had fallen into such
disrepair……. I studied the thick accretion of inky residue and pondered the dramas
that had played out inside these four walls.

The births, the deaths, the quarrels, the passions. And that
was just the goats.

Dino broke down and wept, sobbing through his nose with big
theatrical gasps like a clown in a Verdi opera. I was constantly unnerved by
the penchant Italian men have for spontaneously bursting into tears.

‘…I still cant figure out why every store and office in this
country closes up for a four-hour lunch break in the middle of the afternoon.
………..Why two Italians’ll block traffic by sitting in their cars in the middle
of the road having a conversation. Why their houses have three different-sized
electrical sockets and yet whenever I go to plug something in it, it doesn’t it
in any of them. Why every restaurant but McDonald’s cant be open for dinner
before eight o’clock at night. Why its impossible to make an appointment with
anybody, and when you finally get one, they’re always late. And finally, how
come when you question an Italian about any of these things they look at you like
you’re crazy?’

He welcomed us in and as he helped Nancy off with her coat,
he asked her about her fungus. I thought this was a rather intimate line of
questioning but I soon realized that he was referring to a disease that was
attacking our olive trees up at the piccolo
rustico.

…why the citizens of these two cities [Florence and Ravenna] despise each other, you have to go back to AD
1309, when Italy’s most renowned poet, Dante Alighieri, was exiled from
Florence for political reasons. For years, he wandered Tuscany, venting his
fury by writing the Inferno and peopling hell with all the Florentines who had
done him wrong. He finally wound up in Ravenna, where he died and was buried.
Centuries later, the Florentines realized their mistake and demanded the return
of their favourite son’s remains. The Ravennese refused, and to this day there
is bad blood.

I have a lot of problems with Italy. Its chaotic, confusing,
and oftentimes incomprehensible. But I must confess that I find unabashed
delight living in a society where people still get furioso over the bones of a poet who’s been dead for seven hundred
years.

Unlike the French, who tend to sink into reverential silence
when the food arrives, the act of eating merely increases the Italians need for
volume and drama.

Italy leads the world in young men with funny beards.

‘How can he get away with this?’ I demanded.

Rudolfo shrugged. ‘We’re Italian. We live with a million
laws and no rules.’

…..thats how things get done around here. They’ll do
anything for the mamma.

…it would certainly be good to get back to Los Angeles,
where everybody speaks the same language. Korean.

As soon as I stepped off the plane and into a terminal full
of my countrymen, I began to notice seismic differences. Americans looked heavier,
more serious, more racially mixed, and not nearly as happy as a random crowd of
Italians.

…..so I just plunged on. ‘Prendere mangiamo ….uh, uh, suoi polli’

She flashed me a look of horrified indignation, quickly
huddled her brood together, and ushered them away with such alacrity, I knew I
had said something wrong…. I… discovered
that instead of asking if she were taking her chickens out to eat, I had
asked if I could eat her chickens.

And we wonder why nations have such a hard time hammering
out peace treaties.

During the course of rebuilding our house, we got calls from
our ingegnere, the geometra, the carpenter, and so on asking us to come to
their office or workshop. Invariably, we’d discover that whatever they wanted
to discuss could have been dealt with over the phone. But that’s not the
Italian way. They need to see your face, look in your eyes and use their vast
array of hand gestures. So dependent are they on hand gestures that an Italian
with a missing finger is thought to have a speech impediment.

The bronze plaque that displayed the name of our bank also
announced that this particular institution had been founded twenty years before
Columbus sailed for the New World, and every time I walked in, I felt like
there were still customers from the fifteenth century waiting for a teller. The
bank had computers, but they seemed to be mostly used for sending e-mails and
playing video games…..

….Italian lines, by the way are not straight, but round.
They tend to coalesce into a loose mob, where everyone seems to be able to
follow the threads of many simultaneous conversations at once while never
losing track of who goes next.

The wait was endless, but Italians can endure anything as
long as they can talk. And their preferred way is everybody at the same time
and at a volume we usually reserve for telling somebody the building’s on fire.
It got so deafening in there that the tellers had trouble understanding their
clients.

A word about Italian chequebooks and that word is drab.
Unlike America, where you can order your cheques in lots of twenty thousand and
get them printed with everything from Sunset Over the Mojave to a field of
Happy Faces, Italian cheques come in only one colour: a faded, plain
institutional brown….In a country recognized for style and design, the very
birthpace of the Ranaissance, this is an appalling lack of sprezzatura, or what the Italians themselves call ‘the art of
living’.

A common feature of every government office in Italy is a
constantly ringing phone that nobody ever bothers to answer.

I have no trouble lying to the Italians, because they’re a
highly imaginative people who have an ethereal relationship with the truth.
They are a nation of natural-born storytellers who love to wrap you up in their
yarns. Interestingly, they tend to label such a narrative as una storia, which implies that what they
are telling you can be true, made up or a combination of the two. Often these
anecdotes are long and quite intricate, carefully crafted to elicit your
sympathies, or, failing that, exhaust tyou so you’ll go away.

Italians drive with a ferocity usually connected to a blood
sport – horns blasting, brakes screeching, gears grinding – and that’s just
getting out of the driveway….

Things happen in Italy that happen no where else on earth. A
magical friendliness is spread all over the place like pixie dust. Sure, the
salesman in America who greets you when you walk into Circuit City is as
affable as a sheepdog, but isn’t that well-practised camaraderie all part of
their corporate policy? In Italy, especially in the small family-run shops, the
don’t just go for friendly, they actually seek to engage you as a person.

And this can take so many forms, like the local shoemaker
who examines your heels and tells you that you don’t need new ones yet. Just
walk around on your old ones for quaranta
giorni (forty days), and then come back. Or your favourite fruttivendolo who stops you from
selecting the shiny red applies and steers you to the ugly brown pugs that wind
up tasting more delicious than any apple you’ve ever eaten. When you tell him
you want four, he puts five in your bag because four is an unlucky number in
Italy, while thirteen is not.

There never was any discernible pattern to the work. Some
days nobody showed up. Then suddenly the whole crew would be there with more
heavy equipment than Hitler had when he invaded Poland.

…..I realized that I was becoming so Italian, I looked to
celebrate at the slightest provocation

….I never cease to marvel at how Italian men will ogle a
woman with a blatancy that would get you hauled into court on sexual harassment
charges in America.

If I live here forever I’ll never get used to how Italians
will come over to your house at any time of the day or night. In L.A. the last
person to drop in on anybody unannounced was the Hillside Strangler….One of the
more enduring axioms in literature is the idea that life in an American suburb
is sterile and emotionally desolate.

For a country that seems to be organized along chaotic lines
by a people with a deep-seated sense of anarchy in their souls, Italians dance
in a highly structured way.

….in this heavily agricultural area, where the locals are
fond of saying that if a man has a woman he’s happy for a day, if he has a cow
he’s happy for a week, but if he has a garden he’s happy for a lifetime.

….Fabiola was canonized at a time when it was a lot harder
for a woman, alluding to the existence of a glass ceiling even in the saint
business.

Being the sons of Italian families, it never occurred to
Rudolfo or Stefano to prepare their own meals, wash out a dish, or even pick up
the clothes they seemed to drop wherever they were standing.

The two Italian words most firmly embedded in the English
language are graffiti and paparazzi. Interestingly, both involve a
public display. This tells us much about their national psyche, for the average
Italian is motivated by two powerful forces: fare una bella figura (looking good to his friends and neighbours)
and non fare una brutta figura (not
looking bad to his friends and neighbours)

I think no country on earth benefits from the sunshine more
than Italy. When its overcast and dreary, the grey seems to accentuate how
everything is slightly threadbare and the villages have an almost shabby,
Eastern European feel. But when the sun shines, the ordinary becomes remarkable
and the remarkable becomes transcendent.

Italians like to come early and stay late, so a social
gathering tends to become a marathonlike test of a hosts endurance.

The party lasted all evening and well into the night. Our
neighbours could scarcely complain about the noise, since they were the ones
making it. Italians may never sweep all the gold medals at the Olympics or
establish a permanent colony on the moon, but when it comes to having a good
time, no people on earth can touch them.

It would be difficult to imagine a land where one could eat
so well from just the bounty of the nearby forests, fields and sea.